Moods are near and dear to my heart. Well, the idea of moods is. I don’t use them, myself. Like, ever. And the data shows I’m in good company.

There are only about 20 players who have any player-created moods in their libraries at all, and the vast majority of them have only created a single mood. The players with the most moods in their libraries are myself, John, and our friend Jeff, who created a bunch of moods for a Twitch stream we did together back when moods first launched.

So we have a visionary, aspirational feature that’s always been, let’s admit it, a little half-baked, and has seen essentially zero adoption. At the same time, we’re at work on major renovations that will touch every line of code, and every feature we include makes that project more complex. Quite simply, Mote will be leaving beta soon, and the time for beta features is over.

Given this state of affairs, we’ve chosen to remove moods from Mote. Here’s what that will look like:

• The “Moods” library category has already been removed from the UI for players with no player-created moods in their library.
• Over the next two weeks, the ability to transcribe new moods and the ability to play back existing moods will be removed.
• On March 5, all player-created moods will be deleted. An email will go out by February 19 to all players with data that will be deleted notifying them of the deletion and providing instructions on how to export their data.

I realize we’re talking about a very small amount of data that is almost certainly unimportant to the people who created it, but I want to set the tone of treating players’ data with care, especially as our upcoming plans involve becoming the custodians of much more of it.